Everybody gets a little ribbing at their birthday party, and we're no different. As part of Lifehacker's fourth birthday, let's take an awkward, yet light-hearted, stroll through the strangest and most controversial stuff we've posted.

We made your mothers cry with a flashlight hack

We're always pretty quick to jump on a video or tutorial that tells you how to assemble something new out of stuff that's cheap or already in your home, if it seems cool or useful enough. The second criteria of why you'd build it, or whether it's safe to, sometimes lags just behind the first press of "Publish." So while in posting DIYer Kipkay's turning a flashlight into a handheld burning laser does deliver a creative reuse of old DVD drives, it should have occurred to us that said creation is probably best left in a locked fire-proof box, never shown or explained to kids, and taken out only when everyone in the room is wearing dark goggles and signed off on release forms. Commenter EBone said it best in quoting Dave Attell on the game of horseshoes:

DIYer Kipkay extracts the laser from a DVD burner and mounts it in a small flashlight to create a…
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... this can only end in two ways: 1) This is boring, let's do something else, or, 2) OWWW! My eye!

After all, the last thing a blogging site supported by display ads wants you to do is lose the use of your eyes. (Kidding! Kind of!)

32 AA Batteries from a Single 6 Volt? Not So Much

Cracking open the casing on batteries turned out to be a Pandora's Box for Lifehacker in 2007. We first saw, right before the new year, that you could pull three AAAA batteries from a nine-volt—but those are four As, mind you, and it's only some batteries, and not always acceptable as replacements for those tiny remote guys. But then we saw that you could get eight—eight!—watch batteries from a 12-volt battery. So along came a little video promising to help us 32 AAs from a single 6-volt lantern battery, and, well, we rushed into what we thought was pure money-saving, geeky love. And we got taken. Here's what you really find inside a 6-volt. Heads were shaken and then kept low, emails exchanged, and a vow taken to be far more cautious whenever the leprachauns of the how-to web promise to show us hidden treasure inside household items.

Click to view UPDATE: Several readers who tried this out report that it DOES NOT work, that the…
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Tips that aren't really tips

Just like where you work, it's okay when the Lifehacker staff jokes amongst themselves about how the only life tip left to write about is "Wipe your shoes before you enter your house." When anyone else does it, though, it stings—even it it helps remind us, occasionally, of the fine line between "Good point!" and "Well, duh." So even if detailing the (sometimes) quickest way to get your Starbucks and get out did feel like an inspiring little thought-let to some readers, scroll through the comments, and you've got a good lesson in the instant-feedback training we go through, more than a dozen times a day.

Porn Private browsers that don't work, and otherwise stink

We know exactly why most of the world's web users want the occasional ability to surf without revealing their tracks—they don't want their kids to know they're getting a puppy! If that's your situation, or you've got some other crazy reason, we're sorry we ever pointed you to Browzar. It sounded convenient (plugs into Internet Explorer) and clever, and, hey, there were funny testimonials about why it was helpful! But it turned out to not cover up anything, and it was also full of adware and spammy search results. We certainly weren't the onlyones who thought that a privacy-focused browser was unique and neat—this was 2006, remember—but at least two writers here put their heads on their virtual desks when it was mentioned. So, yes, we're pretty sorry about that one.

Windows only (for now): Just when we thought we'd covered every porn private browsing tool…
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Falling for Windows "fixes" is easy

The typical Windows system is a big, unwieldy thing, stuffed full of safety features, corporate services the home user doesn't need (and vice-versa), and plenty of cryptically named features. And it's hard to tell exactly what's speeding up where, or slowing down, since every computer boot and run is different.

All that is to say we're usually cautious about making deep system changes, but we sometimes get caught up in what seems like ingenious fixes. In the summer of 2008, Vista bashing was the style (as opposed to modern-day, but related, Windows 7 evangelizing), and a setting that seemed to force Vista to use multiple cores for booting seemed like a hidden fix for a deep-rooted problem. Right? No, totally wrong, and that was my bad. Over four years of linking, we've probably ventured into, or at least not explained fully, a few other tips to "speed up Windows" that may or may not work—the catalog is too vast to index and verify. But, luckily, fake multi-core hacks and other such material inspired The How-To Geek to clear the table with a manifesto on debunking common Windows performance tweaking myths.

Click to view As a tech writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad advice littered …
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Anything we've ever written about BitTorrent or file-sharing

We saved the best/most-obvious/guranteed-flame-starter topic for last. There are those who have paid for every MP3, ripped or otherwise, and every video file they've ever had on any type of media player, and use file-sharing networks to trade public domain works. And then there's the vast majority of computer users, whose copyright values range far and wide across the rest of the legal spectrum. We try to keep both the law and its consequences, and the average user's convenience, in mind when we write about BitTorrent, peer-to-peer networks, and net-grabbing tools, and it usually pays off.

Your turn

Before we turn off the projector and put away the Slides of Shame and Silliness , let's give a special shout-out to the posts where someone, anyone, jumped in to suggest the solution to any problem, on any computer, was to "Get a Mac," "Switch to Linux," or even head "back to Windows," on rare occasions. We wouldn't have half the heated comments we do if it weren't for you crazy party crashers!

But wait! Before you go, we'd love to hear which Lifehacker posts struck you as crazily out of place, surprisingly controversial, or as evidence that certain bloggers were working with far too little sleep. Drop the links, and your reactions, in the comments.